Again and again and again.

Christina Yuna Lee: dedicated, magical, stalked and murdered in her own New York apartment.

Sihui Fang: exceptional, smart, robbed and shot at her own massage parlor in Albuquerque.

Michelle Alyssa Go: compassionate, brilliant, pushed in front of a Times Square subway train.

Mary Ye: down-to-earth, wonderful, found dead in an Albuquerque spa.

Four lives taken within the span of a few weeks. Perhaps more, unreported and uncounted.

Again and again and again, Asian women are one of the victims in the system of broken policing. A system with its roots in white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism, and the patriarchy. It is clear in the 339% increase of AAPI hate crimes during the past year, two-thirds have been committed against women. It reeks of a familiar scent in misogynoir and the countless missing and murdered Indigenous women.

And while we fail to acknowledge the existence of this gendered racial violence, there is also the perpetuation of recycling this pattern. Those who are homeless and suffer from mental illnesses are continually described as lone wolves in white supremacy, while they are denied shelter and life. The government performatively grieves while carrying out a prison system which only creates more violent and broken bodies. They point fingers to individuals who are merely products of the system and deny them adequate mental health services. They act shocked at post-incarceration outcomes, while exclusively designing a system to keep darker bodies in jail. It is not until we acknowledge and work on fixing these foundations that the problem of violence against women of color will ever be solved.

Even locally, these problems have been painfully visible. The Asian American Center of UNC Chapel Hill was zoombombed amidst the celebration of the Lunar New Year. Within our history curriculums, we never learn about white sexual imperialism in war, the dehumanization of the first Chinese woman to ever come to America, or discuss how the 1875 Page Act specifically affected Asian women. During health class, we don’t discuss and aren’t warned about how Asian women are disproportionately represented as victims of sexual abuse in online pornography.

Again and again and again.